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11-02-2012, 08:53 AM | #31 |
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
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11-02-2012, 09:01 AM | #32 |
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11-02-2012, 10:21 AM | #33 |
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11-02-2012, 10:31 AM | #34 |
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They have a forum (abandoned?):
http://my.dnldrm.com/portal/forum/default.asp You find hands-on feedback there. It doesn't look good though. Users complain about clunky software and lack of sales. A curiosity: http://ebook.biz/ belongs to them. Referred to as "the world's premier eBook store," they offer it for sale. It makes you wonder how serious they are about the whole eBooks business. Another curiosity: Until recently (2011) they also owned the domain ebook.com. Initially, back in 2002, the domain forwarded to the landing page of their "DeskTop Author" software (that's how old it is - at one point it was on sale @ CompUSA). Today Tesco is the owner of ebook.com. You can imagine they must have made quite a few bucks with this domain sale. They look more like domain auctioneers than anything. |
11-02-2012, 10:42 AM | #35 | ||
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Does the author really believe that those 200-500 people, out of the whole country (world?) are so well in-touch with each other that they'll be exchanging ebooks? Novels spread like fire because they can be recommended to anyone; specialized technical books are not handed around to spouses and cousins and "that guy with the green shirt I met at the Halloween party" because they have no interest. If those people*do* have a passing interest, but would never have bought the book in the first place, what harm does "piracy" do to the author? Quote:
Social DRM, as mentioned, doesn't prevent filesharing at all, but *does* encourage customers to buy their own copy. And with highly specialized books for a technical market, price is likely less of a concern than convenience. Make them easy to use, and reward the customer for good treatment of ebooks (rather than attempting to punish in advance for potential bad treatment), and you'll make more sales. PUBLICIZE that you're treating customers well, and people who don't give a damn about your topics will sometimes buy one of the books, just to see if you live up to the hype. ---- Nobody makes a profit by "stopping pirates" except for the sharks who sell DRM. Authors make a profit by *selling books*, for which "stopping piracy" is an incidental goal at best. Figure out how to reach your maximum market; don't fret over how much of not-your-market also winds up with reading material. If you sold a print book to a doctor, and she hands it around to her whole staff to read, you make one sale. Ebooks can increase that to multiple sales--if they're convenient, and people don't believe the price is gouging them. |
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11-02-2012, 12:02 PM | #36 | |
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11-02-2012, 03:06 PM | #37 | |
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Simply removing a pirated ebook from a pirate site does not guarantee that the people who would have downloaded it will instead go buy it. Paying for a service which goes around and gets that ebook taken down is a waste of money. |
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11-02-2012, 09:46 PM | #38 |
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DRM does nothing to stop piracy, the folks who crack DRM schemes love the challenge of cracking new DRMs and do so simply because they either hate DRM or love breaking restraints.
What DRM DOES do is to turn off customers who would otherwise be interested in your product. If you have a device which is not compatible with the DRM scheme being used or are worried about the company that supports the DRM going out of business then you will not buy the DRMed books for fear of those books being unusable in the future. I have worked in the medical field and in education for years and use some pretty narrowly marketed reference books, books focused on a very small and select customer base and these books are mostly all DRM free BECAUSE there is such a small market. If your target audience is a few hundred sports medicince docs then the chances of those books being pirated is MUCH smaller than a book on the best sellers lists. DRM is not the answer to pirating, it does not stop pirating at all. DRM is like a cheap lock, it will not stop someone who really wants to pirate the book because there are so many ways around every DRM. This has been shown to be the case over and over again, DRM is not difficult to circumvent and it doesn't endear you to new customers who just want to be able to use their books on any device that they have or may ever have. Last edited by jabberwock_11; 11-02-2012 at 09:52 PM. |
11-03-2012, 03:23 AM | #39 |
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There are no guarantees except one, and that one is that if you give up trying to stop piracy because it is hard, you will then have more.
Don't worry about those that arm themselves with every hacking tool known, and then invent some more and who will shield themselves behind fake name and IPs and subterfuge. These are few and far between. What needs to be done is to make sure piracy isn't something the ordinary reader will endeavor to do. It should be made impossible for them, or very difficult, or not easy, or not nice. Any effort at any level has to help the author. Don't give up because you get bad mouthed. Last edited by frahse; 11-03-2012 at 03:31 AM. |
11-03-2012, 11:24 AM | #40 | ||||
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Authors are not helped by preventing piracy; they are helped by increasing sales. Measures to prevent piracy only help authors if those efforts cause sales. Measures to prevent piracy *harm* authors, if the pirates are not potential sales, and the author wasted time and money on DRM applications and take-down notices that they could've spent doing promotions or writing the next marketable work. Anti-piracy measures can be part of a plan to increase sales... but authors need to be aware that their income isn't based on how many pirates they stop. Authors need to find their market and convince them to buy; preventing them from copying doesn't automatically do that. |
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11-03-2012, 12:14 PM | #41 |
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I'll say one more thing and then give up, because this is like talking to a brick wall. DRM does not prevent piracy. DRM only makes it difficult for honest people to use their LEGALLY PURCHASED content.
Let's say you buy a book from company x which has DRM. This book works with your current device so you think nothing of it. A year later you buy a new device and load up your books, but the book you purchased from company x uses DRM that is not compatible with the new device...so you go to the company x web site, but they have gone out of business. Company x also used a DRM scheme that was proprietary, which means NO devices are compatible with it anymore, well there go all of the books you purchased from company x. This seems far fetched, but guess what? It has happened to me twice. Businesses shut down, DRM schemes change (remember Sony's old format?), and people buy new devices. DRM turns honest people towards those sectors of the net that specialize in breaking DRM. The vast majority of people who strip DRM do so to make their books usable, not to pirate. It hinders honest people and doesn't slow pirates down AT ALL. |
11-03-2012, 12:31 PM | #42 | |
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The fact that DRM-free indie book bundles and game bundles still garner sales, even where they allow buyer's to set their own price (I'm looking at you Humble Indie Bundle), suggests that people will buy even where piracy is an easy option. Further, the restrictive DRM suggested by the thread creator seems like it would drive people to try and find a pirate version that doesn't carry with it the annoying restrictions of the legitimate version. If you're this worried, I would suggest releasing only paper versions of the books, and assigning a security guard to each to ensure that your customers (all potential thieves anyway) don't try and take a picture or photocopy anything. |
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11-03-2012, 07:55 PM | #43 |
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Many are addressing the warts and thorns. Fair enough.
I think that there should be an official repository some place that has the eBooks that people bought and a way to transfer these books when the original device has failed. Reader companies are trying to do this in a way that the authors and publishers can agree to, but I see people pointing out the failures of such systems. Still I am for DRM with hope that a better one will come along that will satisfy most if not all of the concerns. Just realize that no system is perfect, and the eReaders are still a very young technology. |
11-03-2012, 09:04 PM | #44 | |
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11-04-2012, 08:55 AM | #45 |
occasional author
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Now come on.
Brick wall have feelings too. If you smash a steel bar against my bricks and mortar, do I not shed dust? Might I not crack? I think someone is saying that I am not helped by DRM. Well, can I be the judge of that? |
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